The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  He is shocked too. Bereaved parents, not knowing until they arrive. Too late then. He thinks of the little white coffins stacked up. A mass grave. Filling up each day. The husband leading her from the grave.

  He kisses the top of her head. ‘I’m very sorry you went through all that,’ he whispers.

  They are quiet for a while. Her hand is resting on his chest. She runs her fingers into the gap between two shirt buttons and touches his skin. He inhales deeply. Her fingers open a button, two buttons.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asks. ‘What happened?’

  She is touching the thin pink skin of his scar.

  ‘I had an argument with a bottle,’ he says. ‘The bottle won.’

  She frowns. ‘A fight?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I fell down drunk one night outside the Barge. I fell on my glass.’

  She looks from his eyes to his scar and back again, the image forming in her mind. Falling down drunk. He can almost hear the clickety-click of her thoughts. He shouldn’t have said that. She’ll think …

  ‘It sounds serious,’ she says.

  He shakes his head, looks away. ‘Fairly superficial.’ He does not say he ended up in St Vincent’s A&E that night. The girl he was meeting for a second date – Sally Meehan – came with him in the ambulance. They lasted three or four months, held together by that fall.

  She strokes the scar. ‘The ancients thought that a scar was where the soul tried to leave the body,’ she says, ‘but the time wasn’t right, so it had to squeeze back in again at the same spot. The person got a second chance.’

  Nice little snapshot of the soul, he thinks, squeezing back in. Souls all around us, coming and going, ducking and diving. We don’t know the half of it. Soul is the form of forms. Stephenspeak. Never understood that.

  ‘A second chance,’ he says. ‘Mmm, I know a few souls that might have been better off escaping.’

  She sits up, looks at him. Strangers can fall in love just by looking in each other’s eyes. Don’t have to say a word. Animosity wanes too. They did experiments – a Jew and a Muslim sitting across a table. Eventually they smiled.

  Somewhere in the house the radio is on.

  ‘This is lovely,’ she says. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’

  He touches her face, kisses her. ‘It is.’

  ‘Can we take it slowly?’ she asks. ‘For now, I mean. Can we not … you know? Is that okay?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he whispers. He takes a deep breath. The smell of her. ‘It’s all okay. Anything you want or don’t want is okay. All we have to be is honest. No games.’

  From the radio, odd notes mingling, musical chaos. An orchestra tuning up, he thinks.

  ‘I love those moments before a concert begins,’ he whispers. ‘When the orchestra warms up and the violinists lift their bows and they all take the key.’ He tells her about a character in a novel who tries to convince his lover to make love in time with Schubert’s String Quintet.

  ‘You’re not going to go all Schuberty on me, are you?’ she asks.

  He sinks his teeth lightly in her arm, closes his eyes. ‘Forget Schubert,’ he says. ‘Look at us! Coming together like planets!’

  In the evening, he shows her around the house, into every room. Afterwards they cook and carry the food up to the dining room.

  She eyes the wall of books. ‘Any update on poor Seamus Seoighe and the pox?’

  ‘No change, I’m afraid. The subject may be dead and the symptoms dormant but the evidence prevails.’

  She glances at the bookshelves. ‘I wish I’d studied English. In your company I feel very under read. I’ve never read Ulysses, you know.’

  ‘I’ll read it to you. We’ll read it together.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that … Why are you so taken with Joyce, so devoted?’

  Where to start. How to put it into words, this ache, this longing for Joyce and Bloom both. Feels inseparable from Bloom. Consubstantial with … The two as one, creator and created: himthem. And grief for Joyce. The private afflictions, the deep suffering. No word for all this. Maybe in another language … German maybe, they’re good at that … schadenfreude, weltschmerz, sehnsucht.

  ‘The work, obviously,’ he says. ‘The genius of it. Leopold Bloom especially.’ The integrity of it. The commitment to the quotidian. His refusal to take conventions for granted. But why say what’s always said? The banality of that. ‘And the man himself, his humanity. His wit – he was a constant punster, a quipster. But he was also a very polite man, thoughtful, sensitive, reserved. People don’t think of him in that way. And for all of his success and all his flaws – and he had many – I think of his life as sad and lonely.’

  ‘But he had Nora.’

  ‘He did. He had Nora.’

  The image of Nora, ever constant, fills him with a gentle sorrow. The two of them, young and carnal together. Nora sitting in dark rooms for hours, looking from her. Decades of hardship, poverty, family woes. Threatening to leave. Not so carnal any more. He must have infected her. Hate to think that. Private. He must’ve been wracked with guilt and remorse. She’d have sensed it, women intuit these things … Lost without him in her final years.

  ‘And George and Lucia,’ he adds, ‘and little Stephen. Family was everything to him.’

  Suddenly, he is arrested by an image. December 1940, Joyce, Nora, George and eight-year-old Stephen, the flight out of France into Switzerland. Like the flight of the Holy Family out of Egypt. He looks at Ruth, about to tell her this. Joyce walking around the French village every day, heartsick, heartsore. Months of uncertainty, worry about Lucia. George cycling back and forth to Vichy to get permits and passports stamped. Cycling to Vichy again to buy a gallon of petrol for a car he’d hired to take them to the station for the 3 a.m. train. The little group huddled together on the platform with their belongings, scarcely speaking for fear of incrimination. Joyce with only twenty-eight days left to live. Did he know? Feel some portent? He who was always sensitive to harbingers and omens must have experienced a moment when everything was presciently clear. At the border, not enough money to pay the duty on Stephen’s bike, so the bike was left behind and Stephen was promised a new one when they got to Zurich.

  He is aware of the silence.

  ‘It has been scientifically proven,’ she says, ‘that when we think of someone, there’s a high probability that they too are thinking of us at that very moment.’

  He thinks she means Joyce. That Joyce thinks of him when he thinks of Joyce and for a second he is thrown, and deeply moved by her understanding. But then as they look at each other it becomes clear. She is thinking not of Joyce, but of the two of them.

  Soon she will leave. When she goes everything will change, the air will have a different density. He scours his mind for a means to detain her but already, in her own mind, she has left and is driving north through the country, waiting for the first sighting of the orange lights of the city up ahead on the horizon. He has to fight the urge to say Take me with you.

  The beginning is beautiful. He is full to bursting with energy and every hour is happy. Alone, during the week, he tries to read but his mind weaves and wanders. He cleans the house from top to bottom, puts flowers on the mantelpiece, speaks kindly to the cats, even to the dog. ‘Work with me, Paddy,’ he pleads, ‘and remember – you’re still on probation.’ At night, too wound to sleep, he re-lives their conversations. He remembers her lost child. Carried him for nine months. Almost full term. Arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent to the human. Bloom in Holles Street, the men rabbiting on with their embryological codology. Harelips and supernumerary digits and faceless foetuses and superstitions about pregnant women stepping over stiles. Women’s lot is harder. The husband with her through it all. Buried a child together. No greater bond. He’d be what … six or seven now? The little funeral cortege crossed the city from the Coombe. Up to Glasnevin, like Paddy Dignam’s funeral. He was still teaching in Belvedere then. It might have passed him on the street,
going up along Parnell Square. Grief-ferrying cars. Everyone outside oblivious. The husband driving, the tiny coffin on her lap. She must think of him, even now. Bloom was always thinking of little Rudy … in an Eton suit, a little lamb in his pocket. If he’d lived, helping him on in life. Tipped the gardener to keep his grave free of weeds. My son. Conceived one morning, Molly looking out the window at two dogs going at it. Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins.

  She comes again at the weekend. She startles him by just being there. They walk through the land and along the road by the river. He takes her hand. He wants to know everything, to be joined in the same neural rush.

  She talks about her work; she tells him about a boy, Shane, whose mother abandoned him.

  ‘He was raised by his grandmother,’ she says, ‘but he’s in foster care now. The grandmother beat him every day since he was a baby. Do you know what she told me? She said, “He was bad since the day he was born.” Those were her exact words.’

  He has an image of her sitting across a table at a case conference or giving evidence in the children’s court, dressed in a dark suit and court shoes, her legs in flesh-coloured tights.

  He tells her of his childhood summers, Ellen home from America, his father, mother, Lucy, the house full to the brim with activity. He tells about Una falling down the well, and about Josie, his heart’s darling.

  ‘Mammy and Lucy used to make fun of her – setting silly traps for her, laughing behind her back.’ A form of gaslighting, now that he thinks about it. ‘Look, Josie … is that Mike Baldwin? they’d say. She didn’t understand TV – she thought everything on TV was real so when she’d see an actor from Coronation Street in another role – on another show – she’d be all confused, all put out. What’s Mike Baldwin doing there? she’d say, he’s supposed to be gone away with Alma this weekend. Mammy and Lucy could be right bitches to her at times … Nowadays,’ he says, ‘she’d be labelled special needs. She was more herself than any of us … She was actually a Buddhist without knowing it … She saw everything, but not the way we do. “Why is that flower there?” she’d ask. I’m not religious but she could touch the Kingdom of Heaven. Honest to God, that’s how I think of her now. She had strange capacities, powers almost. She saw the flower and knew the flower. It’s hard to explain. No explanations of science or psychology or anything rational can explain all she understood.’

  They cross a ditch into his field. Lynch’s cows stop grazing to look at them. He notices clay stuck to her shoes. She will carry the clay back to the city, he thinks, and in that instant he is filled with hope.

  ‘You know what you told me earlier about losing the child?’ he says. ‘Is it okay to ask about—?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Did you and your husband not try again?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Things were difficult – they’d been getting difficult even before we lost the child. Paul was – is – French. He’s a sommelier – he worked at Patrick Guilbaud’s. He lives in New York now … He’s very successful but it’s a stressful life, with very long hours.’ She looks at Luke. ‘He was drinking too much.’ She shrugs. ‘And doing cocaine too. They live hard fast lives in that world. Anyway, he and I were never a good fit. During the pregnancy I had this constant vague fear – a feeling of impending doom. An intuition, I suppose. I could never visualise us as a family. It all seemed surreal, like a dream, and I never felt the child was real or that a child would be born … I know that sounds odd, and I’ve never said this to anyone before, or even articulated it for myself. It was a premonition. As if the child wasn’t … deemed.’ She stops and grows pensive. ‘I don’t think we would have made a good family. The time wasn’t right and the chemistry wasn’t right. Even the biology, when you think of it, didn’t work.’

  A child not deemed. We are alike. She thinks like me.

  She gives a little laugh. ‘I just remembered something! My obstetrician was a short, fat, bald, middle-aged man – Paul called him Dr DeVito. In the weeks after it all happened, I felt close to Dr DeVito, closer to him than to Paul. I felt safe with him – it’s not uncommon after a trauma. People feel a bond with their doctors. Anyway, at one point – don’t laugh – I actually fantasised about him impregnating me – Dr DeVito! I thought if only he … then it would surely work!’

  Cannot picture her pregnant, full with child. See heavily pregnant women with their men on the street. Potent image. The bigger, the better. The men know it too. This is what I did to her, I filled her up, gave her this big belly. Leave the rest to the imagination … Bloom in Nighttown peeping through the keyhole at Blazes Boylan and Molly. Plough her. More. Shoot! The lustier they are, the better. Better chance it’ll take. Fecundity of the compatible.

  They go away to a beautiful hotel by the sea in Kinsale. They stay awake most of the night, talking, their heads on one pillow. On Sunday morning, church bells ring out across the town into their room. His hand is resting on her thigh. She lifts her head and kisses him.

  ‘Do you have condoms?’ she asks.

  He nods, kisses her eyes, her mouth, her breasts, the faint stretch marks on her belly. Nervous, fearful of hurting her, he enters her gently, then remains very still. It is, he thinks, like he has been airlifted from one country and set down in another.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks afterwards.

  ‘How happy I am,’ he replies.

  ‘Liar.’

  Little emanations of the word carry in the air, rising and falling in subtle little movements of sound. A harsh word, liar, but spoken now without harshness.

  ‘Go on, tell the truth. What were you thinking?’ she asks.

  He smiles. ‘A stout shield of oxengut,’ he says. ‘That’s what the boyos in Ulysses call a condom, or what served as a condom in those days!’

  ‘Ugh, oxengut … disgusting!’

  ‘And you?’ he asks gently. ‘What were you thinking?’

  She waits for a few moments. ‘You. Your past. Your gay past.’

  He closes his eyes, inhales. Does she have to? Ruin the moment. Ruin everything.

  He sits up. ‘Please don’t say that.’

  ‘How do you know you won’t go back to men?’ she asks. ‘How do I know?’

  ‘How do I know you won’t go back to men? To other men, to your husband?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How is it different? If someone is going to leave or be unfaithful, it doesn’t matter who they’re unfaithful with … I told you: I’m one hundred per cent monogamous. That’s the only question – whether one is monogamous or not.’

  Tonight I am reading Borges, he writes in an email. ‘The angels are two days and two nights older than we: the Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon they scanned the infant earth.’

  Do you love that as much as I do? How come only the angels have survived? How come we’ve no devils or dragons or werewolves or unicorns any more – except in fantasy? No serpents or centaurs or phoenixes either.

  Borges moves me – his shyness, his gentleness. I feel his loss, a bit like Joyce’s. I mean the loss of him to the world. He called his mother Madre, and she called him Georgie. They lived gently together. He lived very simply, ate only plain food. I want to be more like that. I’m going to give up meat. I want to live simply and honestly.

  ‘The question is not can they reason, or can they talk, but can they suffer?’ she writes. I came across that quote when I was seventeen. When I moved to Dublin I went to talks on animal rights. Tom Regan, an American philosopher, came to Trinity once. I fell in love with him, I read everything he wrote. The rights of the weak and the voiceless trump ours, he says. I read Peter Singer and Andrew Linzey, all the philosophy and science and the animal theology I could get my hands on, and I read all about the animal experiments too. I thought about becoming a Jain – the mercy they feel for every living thing makes me ashamed of how little I do. Do
you know the Jains won’t walk through a puddle because of the microbes, they don’t eat root vegetables because digging them up endangers worms and upsets the subterranean ecosystem. In those days all I thought about were animals: their mute lives, their everyday realities, minute by minute. I’d lie awake at night haunted by some photograph or memory – a lame horse I’d spotted that day, or a hunt I’d met on the road, or a photograph of a laboratory monkey having its eyes sewn up. I was obsessed, consumed, on the verge of a breakdown.

  I had to tamp it all down. Now I think of myself as weak and cowardly for not speaking up more, for being so afraid.

  I don’t want to be afraid any more. I want to be free. You’re free. I never met anyone so free. You don’t care what people think. And yet there’s something old-fashioned about you – do you mind me saying this? You’re a curious mix of modern and traditional. What twenty-something-year-old man would take six months off work to mind his sick aunt? I love that about you – your conviction to do what’s right, no matter what. xr

  I love writing to you! I want to write to you all day! Today I made a To Do list. Item No. 1: Ulysses with Ruth. We’ll start this weekend – I cannot wait! Thus inspired, I took down Finnegans Wake. It’s a nightmare, but I’m determined to get a handle on it. I started underlining all the intelligible sentences and clauses I came upon. I could hear Nora everywhere. ‘I done me best when I was let … But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me?’ I’m going to type them all up so we can read them aloud together. I don’t know if Joyce would be amused or appalled but we’ll have such fun! Lx

  P.S. Attached is a pic of a lewd drawing from the flyleaf of my FW. The artwork is not mine. This (defaced) copy of FW is, I’m ashamed to admit, one I borrowed from UCD’s library sometime in 1999 and never returned. Don’t judge me too harshly – this, a bar of Aero when I was 11 and a fiver from my mother’s handbag when I was 15, are the only things I’ve ever stolen.

  You durty thief you!

  I love writing to you, too. I have imaginary conversations with you all the time. And every hour something seems to drop into my lap that I want to share with you. Today I read about scientists in Massachusetts who have grown human heart tissue inside a spinach leaf. At lunch one day, one of the scientists looked at a spinach leaf on his plate and was reminded of an aorta. They discovered that the network of veins in a spinach leaf replicates exactly the micro vascular system in the human heart. I nearly cried when I read that. They flushed out the veins in some spinach leaves with detergent, stripping them of their green plant cells, and then filled them with human heart tissue.